In his book, “A Resilient Life”, Gordon MacDonald recounts his desire to run track for the Stony Brook School. The demanding coach, Marvin Goldberg, was not impressed with Gordon’s great natural talent as it was undisciplined and untested. Gordon waited for weeks for his name to be posted on the bulletin board as one selected for the team and then one day he heard his name called. Not Gordon but Gordie. ‍“Upon hearing my new name, I headed in Goldberg’s direction. He was standing next to the white bulletin board. When I reached him, Goldberg put his hand on my shoulder and began to speak. As best as I can…

There are two kinds of fools in the world. One is the Biblical fool who is best described as a person with no self-control. He is “a larger child” governed by the impulse of the passing moment and with no ability to rule his tongue, emotions, pleasures or thoughts. He is stupid and self-conceited, and with no ability to see himself as he is, rushes to his own destruction hardly thinking at all about what awaits him. Many of the kings were fools and I’ve written before about Samson as a fool but a consecrated fool. God can use even the most tragic of fools.  On the other hand, there…

While it may be true that history is written by the victors, it is often the tragic last stands that capture our imaginations with the victors being forgotten. This is something of a sacred week in Texas for it was this month in 1836 that a group of 200 volunteer soldiers including Davy Crockett from Tennessee (“You can go to hell. I am going to Texas.”), Jim Bowie, and William Travis held out for thirteen days against a Mexican army of thousands. On the morning of March 6, the Mexican forces broke through a breach in the outer wall of the Alamo and overpowered them. Ordered to take no prisoners…

The mix in the air sustaining us is 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen. Oxygen is food for fire and nitrogen builds structure. We know too much oxygen is fatal and needs nitrogen’s stability but nitrogen needs oxygen’s ability to ignite. Every social and religious movement needs both and that is where the Apostle Paul and those who wanted to keep the new faith as part of the old conflicted. Paul was not just a breath of fresh air to Judaism. He was pure oxygen. The Swiss psychologist, Erik Erikson, studied men and women who start movements and wrote.             ‍ “Virtually every leader of a movement for change has a San Andreas…

I was born in 1946 – one year after Torrey Johnson Billy Graham and Chuck Templeton met and formed Youth For Christ. For years I heard the stories of how Chuck was in fact the better preacher and everyone expected him to “turn the world around.” Known as the “gold-dust twins” Billy and Chuck travelled and preached together to large crowds of teenagers until 1948. It was then that Chuck decided he wanted more theological training and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Billy to go with him to Princeton Theological Seminary. While Billy Graham wrestled through his own spiritual crisis at Forest Home Retreat Center in California and concluded that even…

  Tomorrow afternoon I am going to interview Roy Goble about his new book, “Junkyard Wisdom Rebuilt” and one of the themes in the book and Roy’s life is his relationship with his father. I want to know more about that as it sounds like we had similar experiences. Before he died we took week-long trips together to walk and talk. Years ago while riding the train through the Canadian Rockies, I asked him to reflect on giving. While he had practiced giving all his life, I had never seen anything in writing. Dad talked it out with me while I scribbled some notes. Roy quotes John Chrysostom in his…

My father was a humorist. That is different from being a joker. Mark Twain was a humorist. A humorist can, and often does, tell jokes but that is not their stock and trade. A humorist is one who uses humor not for immediate laughs but is an artist with words, character development, timing, pauses, and the nuances of telling a story. A joke is hit and run. The whole point of a joke is to get a laugh and then move on to the next joke. That is the job of a comedian – but not a humorist. The joke is to humor what the microwave is to gourmet. It…

In 1988, IBM invested $10 million developing a project – Deep Thought – to create a rudimentary artificial intelligence program that could eventually beat a grand master at chess. The original program could calculate 720,000 moves per second. In 1993, the project’s name was changed to Deep Blue and on February 17, 1996 world chess champion Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue and Kasparov won four out of six matches and took home $400,000 in prize money from IBM. One year later, Deep Blue successfully beat Kasparov and became the first computer system to beat a human world champion in a standard chess match. In a press conference afterwards Kasparov…

Several years ago I read an article using research to illustrate how the brain reacts to gain and loss. It seems the amount of pleasure we receive from a gain of $1000 is not equal to the amount of sadness we feel for a loss of the same amount. Our capacity for regret seems to outpace our capacity for happiness. In fact, it turns out that happiness is fairly transitory. Brian Christian in “The Alignment Problem” writes that one of our hormones for creating a sense of happiness – dopamine – plays games with us. While serotonin stabilizes our moods and feelings of well-being, dopamine sends a message to the…

By now, many of you have read the frequent articles and responses to the latest Pew Research showing the number of people who identify themselves as Christians is declining. Over the last seven years, that number has fallen 8 percent. While no one is surprised that the majority of the decline has been in mainline Protestant churches with evangelicals remaining relatively stable, there was a marked rise in the number of adults who indicate no religious affiliation— up 8 percent from 2007. In other words, there is either a significant numerical decline or people taking the poll simply fail to identify for whatever reasons with any particular religion. They may…